Why have my Rankings Suddenly Dropped?
Sustaining high keyword rankings for your website is detrimental for gaining website traffic (In an SEO only standpoint). What makes you “rank” for a keyword is based on the level of search engine optimisation your website has. The factors that weigh up how “optimised” the site is are from a collection of over 200. The difference between how a site ranks compared to having SEO vs no SEO is staggeringly different – This is why knowing where you rank is important.
Reasons why my website rankings dropped
So lets assume you’re a person who is up-to-speed on your website rankings and this may be why you’re here. You’ve noticed your site’s pages are not quite where they were last week, or even yesterday! The reasons for this could be following (they’re extremely common):
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Fluctuations:
- Algorithm Updates:
A fluctuation is when there’s a large increase or dip in the ranking trend. These are visibly noticeable, enough to question what is happening.
Search engines, especially Google, are going under a high volume of updates per-day. Whilst many of these are smaller changes there are often algorithm updates, which we’ll get onto later. The SERP is constantly changing behind the scenes due to these updates which is why sometimes these fluctuations are produced.
Unless you’re a Google Search Engineer you won’t have a prior warning of when SERP changes are happening; however, there are handy indications that do give us a heads up.
(Live fluctuation tracking tool, monitoring the changes in SERP within the Health Sector)
This graph highlights the movement of websites within the search engine results page. A low number means that rankings are steady and unlikely of any change, a high number means large changes to rankings and more likely your site being affected. If this higher number is spread across multiple days then it is likely an algorithm update is being deployed.
I have written a previous blog before on what is a Google algorithm update. The reason they’re listed in this post is due to the fact they can have unforeseen consequences to your rankings, which in hand, can cause drops. Due to the search engine being consistently worked on and tweaked, there are issues that arise that will effect websites.
Back in April of this year there was a search engine bug that de-indexed a large amount of webpages from search. This had a massive effect on rankings due the search engine essentially thinking the pages had been deleted. Luckily it was fixed pretty swiftly but the drops were still noticeable.
This is the reason why I personally think it’s extremely important to keep an eye on these warning signs. If you’re worried your site isn’t performing at it’s best and are looking to improve, feel free to give us a call or 01202 677 277.
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